66 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 22, 2016
THE CRITICS
POP MUSIC
A GOD DREAM
Kanye West unveils a new album, "The Life of Pablo."
BY HUA HSU
ABOVE GUIDO SCARABOTTOLO
O reasons Kanye West in-
spires such a devoted following is
that, despite all of the changes in his
life and in his music, we can still rec-
ognize him as the same character he
was when his story began. He is his own
muse. When West débuted as a solo
artist, in , he came across as an Ev-
eryman striver whose petty arrogance
masked a deeper set of insecurities.
Pu ng his chest one moment, self-
scrutinizing the next, he seemed to o er
a novel archetype: the grounded hip-
hop star. He was never a great rapper,
but he made a style of his enthusiastic
clumsiness, surrounding his verses with
proud soul samples, on "The College
Dropout" ( ); high-res orchestra-
tions, on "Late Registration"( ); and
arena-size triumphalism, on "Gradua-
tion" ( ). As fame came to seem in-
creasingly like a game that could be
rigged, West remained a man of erratic
shifts and intense, flitting curiosities. In
, following the death of his mother,
he released " s & Heartbreak," a di-
visive, stripped-down masterpiece built
around the strange, bluesy e ect of sing-
ing against the grain of Auto-Tune.
With each new project, West was curi-
ous and questing: sometimes he seemed
like a grad student fresh from an art-
history seminar; at other times, he spoke
like an executive at a Silicon Valley man-
agement retreat. Whatever his world
view in a given moment, he always
wanted, desperately, to share it.
The main di erence between then
and now is that West has long since sur-
passed his early dreams. Last Thursday,
he premièred his seventh solo album,
"The Life of Pablo," at Madison Square
Garden, alongside a large-scale perfor-
mance piece by the Italian conceptual
artist Vanessa Beecroft. The event was
streamed online and simulcast to movie
theatres in the United States and Eu-
rope. Rows of models dressed in West's
Yeezy Season fashion collection stood
in formation onstage, doing their best
not to acknowledge West's album as it
rang through the arena. After "Pablo"
concluded, West and his friends took
turns plugging devices into the sound
system and playing their favorite new
songs. At one point, West unveiled a clip
from Only One, a video game he helped
create, which features his late mother
ascending to Heaven on a winged horse.
West said that he hoped to become, one
day, the creative director of Hermès. "I
just want to bring as much beauty to the
world as possible," he added.
As life goals go, bringing beauty to
the world isn't bad. But "beautiful" isn't
the most obvious word to describe West's
recent output. His career-long fixation
on his own contradictions eventually
consolidated into an aesthetic, one that
gave rise to a generation of male art-
ists, such as Drake and The Weeknd,
who wallow in soft self-loathing and
explain away their loutish behavior as
the result of melancholy and bruised
ego. As West's fame has grown, he has
seemed uninterested in moving beyond
this narcissistic stance, apologizing only
intermittently, and halfheartedly, for the
persistence of his asshole ways. His pre-
vious album, "Yeezus"( ), was a bril-
liant collection of prickly, squelching
songs that seemed designed to vet rather
than expand his fan base. It was para-
noid and resentful, its harsh textures
partly inspired by a range of frustrations
with the music industry and with the
insular world of high fashion. While
touring the album, West rapped and
sang from behind a crystal mask, often
launching into long, seemingly free-
associative rambles about creativity and
genius, comparing himself to Steve Jobs
and Alejandro Jodorowsky, criticizing
members of the fashion industry, name-
checking the Nike executives with whom
he had fallen out.
On "Freestyle ," a "Pablo" highlight
featuring instrumentation that sounds
like a fingertip being rubbed around
the rim of a wineglass, West raps, "Name
one genius that ain't crazy." Perhaps his
recent behavior was meant to under-
score his status as slightly crazy and,
therefore, a genius. A little more than
a month ago, West imposed a Febru-
ary th release date for his album. (As
of late afternoon on February th, it
was still not available to stream.) He
documented his long workdays on Twit-
ter, breaking occasionally to squabble
with the rapper Wiz Khalifa---an ex-
change that ended with West's distress-
ingly sexist smear of the model and ac-
tress Amber Rose, whom West used to
date and from whom Khalifa is cur-
rently separated---and to tout Bill Cos-
by's innocence in the face of dozens of
sexual-assault allegations. At a time
when major albums are rolled out in
secret and social-media accounts are
carefully managed---a time when say-
ing very little earns you the benefit of
the doubt---West's tendency to over-
share, in songs and online, often in spec-
tacularly tone-deaf ways, makes him
seem more human and, sometimes,
troublingly misogynistic. On "Pablo,"
this latter trait is especially evident on
the track "Famous," in which West spec-
ulates about a sexual encounter with
Taylor Swift and takes credit for her
renown. It's a throwaway boast on an